Michael Deacon is the Telegraph's Parliamentary Sketchwriter. He also writes regularly about TV.

Why Angelina Jolie is like any ordinary 'mom'

Angelina Jolie with her daughter Vivienne, one of the leading thinkers of our time. Photo: Junko Kimura/Getty Images

No, most ordinary mothers don't have a personal fortune comparable with Angelina Jolie's, and when they want children they're more likely to create one via old-fashioned biological methods than to consult an atlas as if it were a takeaway menu. But in at least one respect, Jolie is just like any other mother: when talking about her brood, she burbles on as if they were the most dazzlingly intelligent children – perhaps even the only children – on Earth.

In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, Jolie describes her adopted son Maddox as "a real intellectual". He's eight. Her adopted daughter Zahara, meanwhile, "has an extraordinary voice and is just so elegant and well-spoken", which is good going for a five year-old. Jolie's biological daughter Shiloh is showing "the early signs of a performer". Extremely early signs, given that last month she turned four.

None of this cooing silliness remotely makes Jolie a bad person: all mothers, except I suppose the awful ones, soppily overrate their children. Hell, if I ever become a mother (nothing is impossible in modern science), I'm sure I'll soppily overrate my children too.

Still: they do go on, don't they? Is it cold of me to scream inwardly every time a mother brags that her drooling daydreamer of an infant is "creative"? Am I a raisin-hearted wretch to wonder whether it might actually be unhelpful to a child's development to slather the little brute continually in nonsensical acclaim for its intellectual and artistic achievements?

A word of warning to my future progeny: wise up. You won't hear a damn word of praise from me until you can spell out the whole of the Canterbury Tales using alphabet blocks.